happenings in space #1: oct. 2-9, 2020
data poetics, the feminist city, an architecture of reparations, glitch feminism, designing for disaster, black botany, borderlands, vibrant matter and visualizing the anthropocene
happenings in space is a curation of virtual events that intersect discourses in art, design, space, place, landscape and environment. bringing together lectures, film series, panels, exhibitions and other conversations across and external to disciplines and institutions, happenings in space seeks to collect, archive and make accessible these unprecedented opportunities for virtual gathering.
The Otolith Group, Medium Earth, 2013
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2
DATA POETICS — CONTROL SHIFT — 5 AM PST ( on youtube later)
Naho Matsuda is an artist and designer making data based artworks. Her approach delves into a shared sentiment of a place from new perspectives. Places come to life through updates, ranging from personal opinions to public announcements, incorporating many layers, voices and emotions. In this Pervasive Media Studio lunchtime talk Naho will discuss her work and process. Don't forget your sandwiches!
THE FEMINIST CITY — COLUMBIA GSAPP — 1PM EST (available later)
Urban space can be a place of possibility and a place of oppression. Informal networks of care make communities bearable for people who have been left behind and pushed out by traditional planning, policy and design. Leslie Kern, author of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World , and Anna Puigjaner, GSAPP Associate Professor of Professional Practice and author of Kitchenless City, discuss their research towards an intersectional feminist urban future. Moderated by Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University.
BORDERLANDS — ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY — 10PM EST, ongoing
Set in the region between the United States and Mexico—long a site of political conflict, social struggle, and intense creative ferment—the featured artists respond to one of the most divisive moments in the history of this area. “Borderlands” features artists Tanya Aguiñiga, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Richard Misrach, and Postcommodity.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 5
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION COLLECTIVE — COLUMBIA GSAPP — 6PM EST (3PM PST)
PANEL: What is the Architecture of Reparations? Response by Charlette Caldwell, Caitlyn Campbell, Brian Turner, and Ife Vanable, The Black Student Alliance (BSA+GSAPP). These artists, designers, architects, and scholars are each included in the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America originally scheduled for Fall of 2020 and to open in the Spring of 2021 at the Museum of Modern Art.
“INHABITANT,” METAHAVEN — HARVARD GSD — 12PM EST (on youtube)
How could we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news? Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6
CAMERON ROWLAND: ENCUMBRANCE — THE COOPER UNION INTRA-DISCIPLINARY SEMINAR — 7pm EST (4pm PST)
The property relation of the enslaved included and exceeded that of chattel and real estate. Plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of people who were enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were mutually constitutive.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7
BORDERLANDS: Carolina Caycedo in Conversation with Natalie Diaz. — VERA LIST CENTER — 5PM EST
Artist Carolina Caycedo discusses her work on fair energy transition and environmental justice that informs her fellowship project over the next two years. She is joined in conversation by Akimel O’odham poet Natalie Diaz, founding director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Emphasizing kinship with land, water, and human and non-human life as well as past, present, and future entities, they consider collaborations and how the lens of Indigeneity can be applied to further our understanding of the relevance of place, borders, and transitional spaces.
SCIENCE CONFRONTS RACE AND RACISM IN A PANDEMIC — COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY — 6PM EST (3PM PST)
As COVID-19 spread around the world questions about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on marginalized groups in the US have been raised in scientific journals, news outlets, and social media. Old debates about whether differential susceptibility to disease is based on race or social and environmental factors have re-emerged. In this talk, Evelynn Hammonds will discuss the contours of these debates historically and in the present moment.
CALIFORNIA BURNING: The Apocalyptic Trinity of Climate Change, Alien Plant Invasion and Exurbanization — Mike Davis — UMass Amherst’s PLANET ON A PRECIPICE
An activist and writer, Mike Davis is the author of 20 books, including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Planet of Slums, The Monster at Our Door, Magical Urbanism, Late-Victorian Holocausts, and most recently (with Jon Wiener) Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8
CORE PROGRAM SERIES: LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN — MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON — 12PM CT (11AM PST)
The latest edition of the ongoing “Core Lecture Series” features contemporary artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In this free virtual talk, Abu Hamdan unpacks his artistic career. His work focuses on sound and its intersection with politics, stemming from his background as a touring musician. Abu Hamdan’s audio investigations have been used as evidence at the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in the United Kingdom, and as advocacy for organizations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International.
VERONICA CEDILLOS: DESIGNING FOR DISASTERS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN: A FOCUS ON UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES — MIT ARCHITECTURE — 6 PM EST (3 PM PST)
GeoHazards International focuses on developing locally-appropriate mitigation and preparedness measures informed by the latest science, engineering, policy, and social science. These include risk-informed planning and growth, disaster-resistant design and construction, planning of post-event functionality of critical infrastructure like hospitals, and science-informed preparedness. Programs are designed to be a catalyst for lasting impact by building local capacity, creating local ownership, and empowering communities. The vision is a future where communities can thrive despite natural hazards.
ONGOING STREAMS
GLITCH FEMINISM — VERSO BOOKS — DISCUSSION
Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, and McKenzie Wark, author of Sensoria and Capital Is Dead, meet online to discuss the divide between the digital and real and whether this divide has in fact already collapsed, virtual as the 'new normal', and whether it is still possible to find utopian space in the virtual.
A Right to the City - A Conversation with Brandi Summers — DC PUBLIC LIBRARY
Join us for a conversation with Brandi Summers, professor of geography and author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City. In conversation with Samir Meghelli, Summers will discuss her book and her scholarship focusing on urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered including her writing about the H Street Corridor in Washington, DC.
Reading the Earth: Vibrant Matter and Human Hubris — E-FLUX — FILM SERIES
In the age of advanced technology, the earth could be read as if it were a script that needs to be interpreted—a trace of its own past and future. This recalls traditional beliefs in animistic nature and begs the question: What are the political implications of recognizing that everything—including rocks, garbage, polluted air, volcanic deserts, the oceans—is alive? The films in Part Four of the series Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory probe the limits and potentials of visualizing the wasted, the inanimate, and the geological. The Otolith Group’s Medium Earth (2013), Ernst Karel, Toby Lee, and Pawel Wojtasik’s Single Stream (2014), Malena Szlam’s Altiplano (2018), Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira’s 4 Waters, Deep Implicancy (2018), and Zlatko Ćosić’s Un-Pollute (2017) examine images of vibrant matter composed by a complex web of active bodies and materials.
Visualizing the Anthropocene: Aesthetics and Politics — E-FLUX — PANEL
In this discussion with art historian T.J. Demos and moving-image artists Toby Lee, Sasha Litvintseva, Susana de Sousa Dias, and The Otolith Group's Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, we will talk about the films screened so far as part of Ecology After Nature, and ask: What can art do about the Anthropocene? How can films approach industrial and extractive pasts and presents? How do they avoid the temptation to beautify the ecological disaster as past sublime representations have done? How to represent climate change inseparably from social and climate justice?—among other questions and themes moderated by Lukas Brasiskis.
ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
BLACK BOTANY: THE NATURE OF BLACK EXPERIENCE — NYBG
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience seeks to acknowledge the complex relationship between enslaved Black people, nature and the colonial environment and reconsider the conscious omission of Black knowledge of the natural world.
LIVING THE CITY — National Urban Development Policy
Cities are full of stories—simultaneous, contradictory, overlapping, and inextricably connected. Living the City tells over fifty stories from architecture, art, and city planning projects in the main hall of the former Berlin-Tempelhof Airport. The National Urban Development Policy exhibition shows processes and opportunities for action in cities across Europe. For three months, the former airport will be transformed into a venue for city life. In a walk-through urban collage, visitors will encounter a range of stories from people and projects that are actively involved in the city and civic society.
PERFORMANCES FOR HANDS AND DESERT FLOOR | JILL R. BAKER | ANTI-AESTHETIC
Performances for Hands and Desert Floor performs a physical and embodied relationship with the landscape. Each piece considers performance, sound, and mark-making in landscape and was created on site in the Mojave desert outside of Death Valley National Park in Rhyolite, Nevada at the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Residency Program. Jill R Baker is a visual artist whose work employs drawing, performance, and video to document improvised interactions with the natural world.
The R.A.W. POSTLIBRARY | Karin Bolender | ANTI-AESTHETIC
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks "untold" stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, pollinators, microbes, and many others. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she cultivates a homegrown, collaborative living-art-research practice that explores dirty words and entangled wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and other experimental arts of multispecies storytelling. The R.A.W. PostLibrary is an ecological LivingArtResearch performance-residency, exploring the hyperlocal/hyperglobal ecologies of staying-at-home, whatever “home” might mean.
UNOCCUPIED TERRITORIES: THE OUTLYING ISLANDS OF AMERICA'S REALM — CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION
At the outer edges of the USA are the tattered fragments of its dominion, known as the Minor Outlying Islands. Though officially uninhabited, each of these islands is one of the 14 Territories of the USA (along with five that are inhabited: Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa). Over the course of empire, most of these remote atolls and islets have been utterly transformed, by resource extraction and global wars. Now they are remnants of our history, where human visitation is restricted or banned outright. The islands are being reclaimed by wildlife, and evolving in their own way. Their future is driven less by national interests, and more by the collective needs of the planet.
MAKING SENSE — Penn Program in Environmental Humanities
Making Sense is an art exhibition supplementing and illuminating the scholarly talks included in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling program. The digital gallery features digital objects contributed by artists and scholars who are also participating in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling Convening. Objects are good to think with and those displayed here provide imaginative prompts to conceptualizing environmental challenges that often elude representation.